Physical skills, such as sports activities, physical therapy, dance, etc. involve a coordinated sequence of some or all of the body parts in a successive or simultaneous arrangement or patterning of these parts for the purpose of achieving a desired result. Conventionally, techniques for training a subject to perform a physical task successfully, so that the person becomes proficient or acquires a skill in the performance of that task, have required the subject to learn from another person's body motion sequence through which the desired end result is successfully obtained. During this process each performance variable is evaluated according to a specific skill representation of a particular physical task. In this manner skill acquisition in performing a physical task is the result of the subject successfully applying previous conditioning, namely, through an accumulation of automated response representations of a successful physical task. Because this type of training limits the subject to only an automated response it does not represent an effective method of physical skill acquisition.